5 ms·

One of my favorite examples: Aistlaţervièllîmļ - skipping an opportunity because it's not ideal, despite the likelihood that an ideal instance will never come

p-e-w 3y ago
But that concept can also be expressed in English – which you just did. If you simply run the English description you gave through a Huffman coder, you should get a compressed version that is the same length or even shorter than the Ithkuil word (English usually compresses to about 1 bit per character). Is Ithkuil anything more than a compressed encoding of English? Can it express any concept that English is fundamentally incapable of expressing?
- adastra22 3y ago
  No, because English is the linguistic equivalent of Turing complete. There is no concept you can’t express (if verbosely) in English. But the weak form of Sapir-Worf is that verbosity and grammar matters, that we tend to think in shortest forms, and that if we had a mother tongue or native-level language that was expressive, precise, and minimally ambiguous, that would be reflected in the clarity of our thinking.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    > English is the linguistic equivalent of Turing complete Proof?
    - adastra22 3y ago
      You are asking for a proof of a negative, which can’t be proven. Nevertheless I offer the entire field of computational semantics, which has yet to generate a counter-example.
    - kortex 3y ago
      English (or any human language with the possible exception of Pirahã) is not a formal grammar, but if it was, it would behave like a recursively enumerable one, at the top of the Chomsky hierarchy. Given enough time and enough text, you can express anything computable. Think about it this way, I give you instructions in english, and you have to follow them: You are acting as a turing machine. Your symbols are s1, s2, ..., sn. Here are your processing rules: ... Here is your tape: ... Begin! You could follow that process to the letter, given enough time, focus, and tape (insert xkcd reference about rocks in the desert).
      - p-e-w 3y ago
        This makes no sense to me. What does computability have to do with semantic expressiveness? You've demonstrated that English can generate every sequence of tokens, not that it can express every concept.
        kortex 3y ago
        If a concept can be expressed as a sequence of tokens, then bam, we're done. If a concept can't be expressed as a sequence of tokens, then it doesn't really matter, because no language can, since some concepts exist which are not computable, and all languages have the same drawback. Either way, "English is the linguistic equivalent of Turing complete" is valid, since it is at the top of the hierarchy, and as powerful as any other language (eg everything Ithkuil can express, so can English).
        p-e-w 3y ago
        > everything Ithkuil can express, so can English Imagine there is a concept that no language can express. Now Ithkuil introduces a new word that is defined as that concept. But English (and all other languages) still cannot express that concept. So the idea that all/most languages are expressively equivalent appears to be false. The Chomsky hierarchy is about grammatical expressiveness, not about semantic expressiveness. I see no reason to believe that all languages have the same semantic expressiveness, which is what I understood the above claim to mean.
    - mcguire 3y ago
      By construction. Assume language L has concept C expressed by term T, while English does not have a simple term for C. Further, assume that English speakers have a frequent need to express C. English will simply absorb T and trundle off like the demented lunatic it is. Examples include remuda, schadenfreude, and obi, all of which are copacetic English words after a remarkably short period of time.
  - ajuc 3y ago
    One example where natural language is clearly suboptimal is math. Most people can do simple transformations on equations with small polynomials in memory. But that's thinking in formulas. When you try to do it in plain English it becomes very hard.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      I agree. Wouldn’t it be interesting then to see what we could accomplish if we unlocked similar formalisms for critical thinking and daily life? I’m not a fan of Ithkuil actually, as I think it takes it too far. But I do wonder how much clearer our thinking would be if we had a logical / rational language as our mother tongue.
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      It's suboptimal but not impossible. As a child I won a prize (not first place, just a mention) in a national mathematical competition despite the fact no-one had taught me algebra yet. The judges found my reasoning "interesting" and I got the right answers to the puzzles. Of course when, a couple of years later, I was taught algebra, I was wondering why I hadn't been told before!
random_upvoter 3y ago
Does Ithkuil have any provisions to express power dynamics between speaker and listener, say politeness levels? For instance all languages that I know have constructions to soften up requests, or make statements less assertive.

p-e-w 3y ago

But that concept can also be expressed in English – which you just did. If you simply run the English description you gave through a Huffman coder, you should get a compressed version that is the same length or even shorter than the Ithkuil word (English usually compresses to about 1 bit per character). Is Ithkuil anything more than a compressed encoding of English? Can it express any concept that English is fundamentally incapable of expressing?

adastra22 3y ago
No, because English is the linguistic equivalent of Turing complete. There is no concept you can’t express (if verbosely) in English. But the weak form of Sapir-Worf is that verbosity and grammar matters, that we tend to think in shortest forms, and that if we had a mother tongue or native-level language that was expressive, precise, and minimally ambiguous, that would be reflected in the clarity of our thinking.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > English is the linguistic equivalent of Turing complete Proof?
  - adastra22 3y ago
    You are asking for a proof of a negative, which can’t be proven. Nevertheless I offer the entire field of computational semantics, which has yet to generate a counter-example.
  - kortex 3y ago
    English (or any human language with the possible exception of Pirahã) is not a formal grammar, but if it was, it would behave like a recursively enumerable one, at the top of the Chomsky hierarchy. Given enough time and enough text, you can express anything computable. Think about it this way, I give you instructions in english, and you have to follow them: You are acting as a turing machine. Your symbols are s1, s2, ..., sn. Here are your processing rules: ... Here is your tape: ... Begin! You could follow that process to the letter, given enough time, focus, and tape (insert xkcd reference about rocks in the desert).
    - p-e-w 3y ago
      This makes no sense to me. What does computability have to do with semantic expressiveness? You've demonstrated that English can generate every sequence of tokens, not that it can express every concept.
      - kortex 3y ago
        If a concept can be expressed as a sequence of tokens, then bam, we're done. If a concept can't be expressed as a sequence of tokens, then it doesn't really matter, because no language can, since some concepts exist which are not computable, and all languages have the same drawback. Either way, "English is the linguistic equivalent of Turing complete" is valid, since it is at the top of the hierarchy, and as powerful as any other language (eg everything Ithkuil can express, so can English).
        p-e-w 3y ago
        > everything Ithkuil can express, so can English Imagine there is a concept that no language can express. Now Ithkuil introduces a new word that is defined as that concept. But English (and all other languages) still cannot express that concept. So the idea that all/most languages are expressively equivalent appears to be false. The Chomsky hierarchy is about grammatical expressiveness, not about semantic expressiveness. I see no reason to believe that all languages have the same semantic expressiveness, which is what I understood the above claim to mean.
  - mcguire 3y ago
    By construction. Assume language L has concept C expressed by term T, while English does not have a simple term for C. Further, assume that English speakers have a frequent need to express C. English will simply absorb T and trundle off like the demented lunatic it is. Examples include remuda, schadenfreude, and obi, all of which are copacetic English words after a remarkably short period of time.
- ajuc 3y ago
  One example where natural language is clearly suboptimal is math. Most people can do simple transformations on equations with small polynomials in memory. But that's thinking in formulas. When you try to do it in plain English it becomes very hard.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    I agree. Wouldn’t it be interesting then to see what we could accomplish if we unlocked similar formalisms for critical thinking and daily life? I’m not a fan of Ithkuil actually, as I think it takes it too far. But I do wonder how much clearer our thinking would be if we had a logical / rational language as our mother tongue.
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    It's suboptimal but not impossible. As a child I won a prize (not first place, just a mention) in a national mathematical competition despite the fact no-one had taught me algebra yet. The judges found my reasoning "interesting" and I got the right answers to the puzzles. Of course when, a couple of years later, I was taught algebra, I was wondering why I hadn't been told before!

random_upvoter 3y ago

Does Ithkuil have any provisions to express power dynamics between speaker and listener, say politeness levels? For instance all languages that I know have constructions to soften up requests, or make statements less assertive.